On the occasion of its Golden Anniversary, Brown v. Board of Education has been described by lawyers, historians, educators, and journalists as perhaps the most important civil-rights decision of the twentieth century. Without dispute, the decision holds a prominent place in American education law. The open question, however, is whether American education and American courts will ever fully embrace the vision of those, like Thurgood Marshall, who saw Brown‘s true promise.

One of the most intriguing questions in the study of American law during the period of Jim Crow is how American society could see itself as the city on a hill for constitutional equality while also creating and enforcing a formidable structure of legally mandated white supremacy. The peculiarly American contradiction between long-professed and deeply held equality and liberty principles and a devastating history of racism has often been noted, and as one scholar has observed, the maintenance of both aspects in law required significant cultural and legal self-deception. This Article argues that the answer can be found, in part, by studying how the law operates to manage societal cognitive dissonance. It is not enough simply to identify the contradiction; we also should look at the mechanisms by which law manages the contradiction to see how equal citizenship principles were so grossly violated, yet so willingly accepted, by the white legal elite. This analysis may also help us see how the doctrines and rhetoric of equal citizenship can both facilitate and hinder real progress.

When Irene Morgan boarded a Greyhound bus in Hayes Store, Virginia, on July 16, 1944, she had no inkling of what was about to happen—no idea that her trip to Baltimore would alter the course of American history. The twenty-seven-year-old defense worker and mother of two had more mundane things on her mind. It was a sweltering morning in the Virginia Tidewater, and she was anxious to get home to her husband, a stevedore who worked on the docks of Baltimore’s bustling inner harbor. Earlier in the summer, after suffering a miscarriage, she had taken her two young children for an extended visit to her mother’s house in the remote countryside near Hayes Store, a crossroads hamlet in the Tidewater lowlands of Gloucester County. Now she was going back to Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment and perhaps a clean bill of health that would allow her to resume work at the Martin bomber plant where she helped build B-26 Marauders. The restful stay in Gloucester—where her mother’s family had lived and worked since the early nineteenth century, and where she had visited many times since childhood—had restored some of her physical strength and renewed a cherished family bond. But it had also confirmed the stark realities of a rural folk culture shouldering the burdens of three centuries of plantation life. Despite Gloucester’s proximity to Hampton Roads and Norfolk, the war had brought surprisingly few changes to the area, most of which remained mired in suffocating poverty and a rigid caste system.

When Ralph W. Ellison heard about the Brown v. Board of Education decision in May 1954, he wrote a friend, “What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!” Other African-American leaders were equally excited—in part because they had wondered, even as late as May 1954, what the United States Supreme Court might say. Thurgood Marshall later commented, “I was so happy I was numb.” At the time, Marshall estimated that legalized school segregation would be wiped out within five years.

I was born in a village, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, on the second of January, 1915. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a lawyer. They had met in Tennessee, where they both were in college, and after a period of time they married and moved to Oklahoma. It was still Indian territory, of course; it became a state in 1907.

My father sought to practice law in Rentiesville, but in a village that had not much more than a hundred people, the practice of law was not a very viable and promising profession. And so, in 1921, after consultation with my mother, he decided to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he could perhaps attract more clients and make a decent living for us. He moved there in February 1921.

We were to move in June after school was out, after my mother completed her teaching and my sister and I had finished our school year. We were all packed and ready to go, and then we didn’t hear from him. And we didn’t hear. And we didn’t hear. Eventually, after several days, my mother read in the newspaper that there was a terrible race riot raging in Tulsa and that there were many casualties. She was not certain that my father had survived.

It is impossible for me to reflect on Brown v. Board of Education and its meaning these five decades later without revisiting in my mind’s eye the white Southern racist society of my youth and young adulthood.

That was a time when my hometown, Nashville, Tennessee, was as racially segregated as any city in South Africa at the height of Apartheid; when every city in the South, large and small, was the same; when African-American residents of those communities were denied access to any place and every place they might need or wish to go.

The legal myth of “separate but equal” had cunningly banned black citizens from every hospital, school, restaurant, trolley, bus, park, theater, hotel, and motel that catered to the white public. These tax-paying citizens were denied access to these places solely on the basis of their race by tradition, custom, local ordinance, state statute, federal policy, and by an edict of the United States Supreme Court fifty-eight years before Brown in Plessy v. Ferguson. In too many of these cities, black citizens were even denied access to the ballot box on election day.

It is really a great honor to be here with my old Duke University colleague, John Hope Franklin, one of the great men of my time.

John Seigenthaler is a distinguished editor, reporter, and colleague for whom I have the highest respect. He took time out, as you know, to be Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant. As such, he was in Montgomery trying to protect the Freedom Riders. He was beaten almost to death and hospitalized. So he is a man who has been there, and he is a great friend.

Brown v. Board of Education, in my view, split American history. I am certain for African Americans it did. It split American
history into a kind of A.D. and B.C. Prior to Brown, either as a consequence of slavery or a consequence of segregation, African
Americans were subordinated one way or another by law.

I thought one of the most eloquent statements that a president has made about race was the statement that George W. Bush made in Philadelphia last spring when he was attempting to quell the reaction to Trent Lott’s statement at the retirement party for Strom Thurmond. Now, some people might be surprised to hear that. But George W. Bush said that “[e]very day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals.”

Fundamentally, what I want to do today is to use the lens of Brown v. Board of Education, the celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, and look at it as a “work in progress,” even after fifty years. But before getting to that part of my comments, it bears repeating that we are here to celebrate and recognize that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of Brown. However, we also need to celebrate and recognize all of the Browns, all of the Briggses, all of the Beltons, all of the Davises—that is the Virginia case—and all of the Bollings—that is the District of Columbia case. Those are the names of some of the parents and children that are associated with the five cases that constitute Brown v. Board of Education.